Keeping It Going

The whole issue of ageing and the passing of time is pertinent to the sorting process. There’s nothing like opening up a box full of vintage Oor Wullie and Schoolgirl annuals, or a suitcase full of retro hats and clothing, to jolt your memory, transport you right back in time and evoke the sweet memories of youth.

It’s over 20 years, maybe more, since I’ve worn any of these carefully preserved items of clothing and it’s made me acutely aware of the many issues around ageing. ‘Mutton dressed as lamb‘ is a phrase that’s sprung to mind more than once as I’ve looked lovingly at various pairs of shoes, hats and dresses, made of the most exquisite fabrics, and resigned myself to the fact that, never mind too big, I am also now too old to wear them.

Consequently, I’ve shifted from feeling I could never part with these unique, one-of-a-kind garments, to accepting that I could. I won’t actually ever wear them again and the time has come to move them on – for the next generation. Timing is everything – I’m ready and it feels okay – a relief, in fact, to let go.

My sister’s attic has now been totally emptied and the one hundred or so bags that were filled with pre-sorted items of clothing and accessories have been condensed to around thirty. I have been selective and picked out only the best quality items of clothing, hats, shoes and handbags left over and stored since the days when I sold vintage clothing to supplement my income.

There are both negative and positive aspects to having collected what I have over the years – on the one hand, feeling dragged down by the sheer volume of it all – on the other, experiencing moments of pure joy when I rediscover things that frankly, just seem irreplaceable.

What to do with them has been the big question; a lot has been packed off to various friends, family members and charity shops and a lot more is being held in reserve for a fundraising day I’m holding in May.

And of course, a proportion of it is being kept as raw materal for my creative practice – the art I’m currently making, based around objects and their associative, autobiographical narratives and the art that I will almost certainly make in the future.

I struggle still with the desire to keep everything – it all has the potential to my mind to ‘come in handy’ one day. But I’m increasingly finding myself with the ability to be more ruthless – and accepting that what can’t be sold, donated or given away, simply has to go. Despite all my best efforts to unite everything I own and have all my possessions together in one space, I’m starting to accept that it might not be possible. I can’t underestimate the sheer volume of stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. There simply isn’t enough room to keep everything.

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With so much time being consumed with schlepping boxes and bags from my sister’s attic into my car, then transporting them to my home where I slowly sort through them, it’s been more difficult to get into the studio. But I have managed to get there, even if it’s just for brief, snatched periods of time – often to match up something I’ve found in the day which I know will be ‘just right’ alongside something in the studio – I can’t tell you what a thrill this gives me! (Sad, I know – but honest, at least).

My main focus when it comes to these choices seems to be colour, prompted by the amazing range of hues and shades of things I’ve found when sorting – all so evocative of certain eras. Colour has been the main emphasis in collecting together the various items and imposing some sort of order on them. It’s been interesting to work with different types of material and the 1960s plastic doilies, table placemats and flowers have opened up a completely new colour palette for me – all very symbolic of the passing of time, changing trends and fashions and the consequent physical changes I saw in my Nana’s home, in which she lived for over 70 years.

Plastics of the 1960s have their own distinct colour range and I’ve focused on bringing together the various plastic objects I’ve found in the assorted bags and boxes. I’ve placed them on the plain walls of the studio and onto different types of formica/wood effect backgrounds and photographed them, trying to make some sort of sense and order of them, in order to fully appreciate their appeal.

Certain things have transported me right back to specific moments in time – childhood days and memories of certain rooms – in my Nana’s home, as well as my own – the pictures on the walls, the placemats on the table, the doilies on the sideboard, the plastic flowers in a jug in the front room.

Plastic is mass-produced and robust – indestructable, at the same time as being throwaway, ironically – a million miles away from the preceding days of careful preservation and the ‘make do and mend’ way of caring for worldly possessions. Working with objects made of plastic is in sharp contrast to the materials I’ve worked with more recently – in terms of colour, in terms of their availability and in terms of how I handled and treated them. The mass-produced plastic items feel so much less precious than those from the 1930s/40s era; those I used in the ‘Here Today’ assemblage, for example – the handcrafted mirror, the handmade silk velvet flowers – have a certain aura about them – of being unique, one-offs, precious and in need of being preserved, respected and tenderly looked after. This contrast has made me think yet further about the importance and value of objects – how much they represent in terms of our identities – socially and politically, and also in relation to our cultural identities. And our place – our social standing – in the world.

I’ve felt invigorated and excited by the new ideas that the sorting has introduced, leading me to an ongoing work in progress, one which I’m excited to explore further. My current working title ‘Nana’s Colours‘ has become the collective name I’ve given to the various small, simple assemblages I’ve made during these short bursts of art making. It’s felt important to keep making art amidst all the chaos and upheaval caused by this past month’s massive sorting; it’s helped ground me. And I’m pleased with some of the results that the gathering together of various bits and pieces of fabrics, objects, books and other things has created.

Now I can’t wait to see what the future brings, in terms of getting back into the studio regularly again to make art. I’m currently negotiating a chunk of time in my head when I can be there for a good few solid hours – to immerse myself and see what comes of spending time with yet more of the new material I’ve recently taken into the studio. And I’m already looking forward to reporting back – there’s a grounding effect to writing this blog, too.

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Half an hour or so after publishing this post, this film came to my attention, sent by a friend: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/107292…

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I’ve been itching to get back to writing here – so many things I’ve wanted to share about the past month’s serious sorting. And I do mean serious. Dozens of bags and boxes from the past – all stored in my sister’s attic, untouched for the past eight to nine years. My sister’s impending house move has forced me to make decisions about a) which items I’d like to keep from the numerous boxes of clothes, books, ceramics, etc and b) whether I have sufficient space to store them.

I’ve collected a considerable amount of stuff in my life – there is no escaping that fact. At times it’s felt like a burden, weighing me down and making me feel completely stuck. But at the back of my mind, I’ve known that there would come a day when I would need (and feel ready) to face the sheer volume of accumulated stuff – head on. Perhaps that time is now. Certainly, I’ve made the decision to fully embrace my collections – to accept the enormity of them rather than remain shy of admitting to the sheer volume of them and to stop skulking around, feeling guilty and embarrassed about them.

Sorting through this latest batch of stuff has been an emotionally as well as physically demanding time, though I’ve managed to stop myself feeling quite so overwhelmed this time round; experience has taught me that a measured and positive approach to the whole process of sorting is more beneficial. An acceptance, too that any kind of delving into the past has the potential for bringing up a whole range of emotions, not all of them welcomed – the losses, regrets, the inevitability of ageing and the passing of time and so on. Being prepared helps, to some extent.

With this shift in my thinking, I’ve started to enjoy the whole process more; to view the sifting and sorting as less of a necessary evil and more like a useful and worthwhile task in relation to my creative work – these things after all, provide the raw material for the art I make.

I’ve had moments of feeling excited about reconnecting with some of the things in my sister’s attic – books, for example, that I remember reading to my sons included a 1960s Deans fairy tale book of my own – classic, familiar tales, beautifully illustrated. In the knowledge that I can’t keep everything, I showed my now grown-up sons the book, eager to know how many of the tales they remembered. Rapunzel? Hansel and Gretel? The Princess and the Pea? Sleeping Beauty? Their reaction was matter-of-fact – they remembered some of them, but it wasn’t the momentous response that I’d thought (hoped?) it might have been. While it meant so much more to me, to them it was just a book from their past. And hard though it is, through accepting this, I’ve been able to let go of the book. It indicates a shift in my thinking – I can’t (and neither do I want) to keep everything.

But like all good fairy tales, there’s often a darker undercurrent at work and as well as joyful reunions, I’ve also had moments of feeling totally churned up about reconnecting with some of the items from my past. There’s a sad and upsetting story behind the 1980s salmon pink, silk dress I refound, for example – the emotional impact of finding it again took me quite by surprise. It’s a story I might decide to share here one of these days but for now, despite the years that have passed, it all feels too raw and in need of some careful processing. I know I don’t want the dress, but what I do with it is another matter. My strong feelings about it will no doubt subside, but my gut feeling at this moment in time, is that I’m just not able to throw it away – that it requires some sort of proper, significant letting go ceremony, whether real or symbolic. Feelings change by the day of course, so I’ll see how it all unfolds.

About a dozen more boxes and bags in the attic to sort through in the meantime – and then the joys of getting back into the studio and focusing on new work that has stemmed from this whole sorting process. I can’t wait.

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I found this fascinating article on the Brain Pickings site yesterday – timely, and relevant to what I’ve been thinking about recently, while in the process of sorting.

One of the most striking things about revisiting stuff from my past is how irrelevant some of it now seems. The passing of time inevitably impacts on our feelings and the emotional attachment we make to items can be considerably diluted.

I’ve been letting some things go in the process, both physically and emotionally – not much, it has to be said, but I’ve discarded a few small bits and pieces that no longer hold any great personal significance for me. It’s requiring time and patience – there’s a deep psychology attached to the art of collecting as any avid collector will tell you; it can actually feel physically painful to part with certain items, I find.

So I’m trying to be gentle on myself – and besides, I don’t have to get rid of anything at this moment in time. Looking ahead however, I know that it won’t be too long before I’ll need to confront the rest of the stuff I have squirrelled away in other peoples’ attics, garages and sheds. In the meantime, I’m following the advice of an artist friend through keeping photographic records of some of the objects I’m finding it hard to let go of. That seems to be helping.

The whole sorting process and thinking around letting go, is taking me back to 10×10. In 2008, I gave up 100 objects that were precious to me for exchange. Since then, I’ve religiously documented every exchange that’s taken place in the various outings 10×10 has had so far. It’s led me to some extraordinary stories and forced me to think more deeply about the whole concept of value and worth.

But for now, more food for thought on the subject of letting go via Anais Nin’s diary musings. I’m not necessarily at the stage I was at in 2008 yet – a point when I felt emotionally robust enough to part with a huge part of my past in the shape of objects (and 100 of them at that) – but I sometimes wonder if I might be building up to ridding myself of more things in the future …

Our Objects, Ourselves

by Maria Popova

“If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects.”

In September of 1944, amidst the physical and spiritual devastation of WWII, Nin writes in her diary:

The physical as a symbol of the spiritual world. The people who keep old rags, old useless objects, who hoard, accumulate: are they also keepers and hoarders of old ideas, useless information, lovers of the past only, even in its form of detritus?

I have the opposite obsession. In order to change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use. I keep nothing to remind me of the passage of time, deterioration, loss, shriveling.

And yet we attach enormous significance to objects. But perhaps Henry Miller, Nin’s longtime lover and friend, had it right after all when he observed that “all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.”

It seems ironic to me that over the past few weeks, I feel like I’ve had everything and yet nothing to say. It’s been three weeks since I posted here, at which point I wrote about tying black gags around the mouths of assorted ceramic figurines. The figurines were all female – innocent and child-like in their appearances – pretty, essentially – to be ‘seen but not heard.’

I had a vague sense of what it meant when I was carrying out the physical act of tying on the gags – ie. in response to the stop domestic violence posters I’d seen in the local area in the lead up to Christmas – but it’s taken time to understand the full significance of why I did what I did.

Retrospectively, I realise that so much of what I wrote about gagging and keeping quiet was symbolic of the way I’d been feeling; the physical act of literally shutting up the figurines was a strong personal statement and is a classic example of how much my emotional life impacts on what I make. Through quite literally shutting the mouths of the figurines and keeping them quiet, I was acting out a desire to stay quiet myself, albeit unconsciously at the time.

That’s the crux of it for me, really – it’s a recurring theme when writing this blog – what to say, versus what not to; what’s important and what isn’t. Certainly, there have been times when, through keeping one eye on the ball of what’s happening in the big wide world out there, I’ve felt that what I have to say just pales into insignificance – and I’ve always been conscious of not wanting to navel gaze, to engage in ‘excessive introspection, self-absorption, or concentration on a single issue.‘ Reminding myself of the recent UK floods, what’s happening in Ukraine at this very moment in time for example, is all part of my desire to keep an eye on the bigger picture, to ultimately keep a perspective on real life, as a practising artist.

Every so often, things seem to stand still and a nagging inner voice forces me to take stock of things, to check in with how I’m really feeling – the life/work/family balance and how to sustain being an artist, in every sense of the word. I haven’t felt particularly inspired in the studio recently, but I’m learning through experience to anticipate these rather barren periods, to accept them and to manage them as effectively as possible – hanging on in there, keeping the faith and so on.

There’s no doubt that it’s infinitely easier to write here when work is being made, focusing more on the process rather than writing about vague, abstract ideas around it.

But creativity, I’m learning, can’t just be turned on like a tap – there are peaks and troughs in even the most successful creative practices. But the mantra ‘just do it’ is one I always seem to return to and do my best to act on – because, however uninspired I might feel, however inadequate, bored, uncertain – it’s the doing it, making the work – that’s important. Back to the studio then, I suppose – fired up at least, with a new idea to experiment and play with.

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